DESIGN HAS BECOME AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT IN DEFINING the corporate identity of a company. In the past one decade, web design industry has gone through some construction phases. Various tools emerged in the market bringing out some new dimensions to the design. It started off from static html pages with various background and font tags to add colors to the website. Then came the Javascript and CSS to add creativity to the designs. And from Adobe Photoshop till Macromedia Flash, design industry has taken various steps to what we call modern web design. Though a number of new tools were introduced, designs remained one dimensional for quite some time. That's understandable as any transition takes its time. Let's see where the modern day designs are heading.

As I mentioned above, it took some time for the designers to incorporate all the options available to them therefore most of the designs in recent past were either a static page designed with some designing tools like Photoshop or Fireworks or it could be a flash animation all the way. Many sites had a separate flash intro with html site. Now that the industry has matured, we now more see a combination of both. An example of such combination is Macromedia's site itself. It is based upon html with flash incorporated nicely in every page. Shopping cart, presentations and movies are presented in flash windows. If you have been visiting some ready made templates portals, you could see almost all the templates designed with a designing tool and animated with flash.

Now more sites are heading towards a simpler and cleaner looks. The idea of 3D buttons and headers seem to be dying out. Also we can see less number of colors placed in a more presentable form. No more flashy pictures and text all over the place. Playing around with two to three colors to make up a corporate identity is also a common practice seen these days. The idea of putting little or no information also seems to be rising above. With all this in front, it could be said that websites these days are not only about just placing information. It's about building an identity, such that the person with no reading capabilities would claim it to be yours without any doubt. Have a look at these favorite websites to feel what I intend to say.

The writer is a Computer Engineer and is currently serving as Creative Director at a Denmark based company known as Mobile Weaver. He can be reached at ahsan.mansoor@gmail.com